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voice. She ran her hands over him, searching for his ties, and discovered handcuffs securing him to a metal pipe welded to the wall. She wasn’t going to be able to break through those like she had the women’s duct tape, but she could remove the burlap bag from over his head.
    “Fuck,” he breathed and jerked on the cuffs. “What happened?”
    “I tried to get away. I really tried, but I was afraid of being in the desert after dark and I ran for it. But they knew I was still here all along and they were ready for me.”
    “Fuck,” he said again, and she couldn’t quite muffle the sob that worked its way up out of her throat.
    The cuffs rattled again. “Mara, I’m not angry with you. Okay? I’m not, but—” Another vicious yank made the whole wall rattle. “Goddamn these things! Come over here. Please. I need —” His voice caught. “I need to know you’re okay.”
    She swallowed down another sob and crawled up beside him, wrapping her arms around his waist. “I’m okay.”
    “All right. All right,” he repeated as if trying to assure himself. He rested his cheek on top of her head. “Who’s in here with us?”
    “Nine other women, most of them Mexican. I think they were kidnapped.”
    “Yeah, they were. Nikolai Zaryanko is a trafficker. Humans, drugs, guns, organs—if he can get his hands on it, you can bet he’ll sell it. Rumor has it he sold his own sister.” He hesitated. “Mara, no matter what, he can’t find out about your, uh…”
    “My pregnancy?” she finished.
    “Yeah. That.”
    Travis couldn’t even say the word aloud. And here she’d thought she had done the right thing by contacting him about the baby. Now, hindsight being twenty-twenty and all that, she saw it for the mistake it was. She backed away from him and immediately missed the heat of his body. She was so cold, down to the very center of her being. “He’ll try to sell the baby, too, won’t he?”
    “Yeah. He’ll auction it off to the highest bidder.”
    “Oh, God.” Sick dread surged into her throat. She swallowed it down, wrapped her arms around her middle, and huddled against the wall in the dark. Sobs and whimpers echoed around the plane from the other women. One was reciting the twenty-third psalm in Spanish over and over in a choked, hushed tone.
    But she would not fall apart like them. She didn’t have that luxury.
    “Mara,” Travis said softly. “We’ll be okay.”
    “Please, don’t do that. Don’t coddle me.” She lifted her head and looked toward his voice. “Tell me the truth.”
    He said nothing for several agonizing beats. “The truth is unless my team finds us, we’re screwed. But I swear I will do everything in my power to make sure they find us.”

Chapter Seven
    El Paso, Texas
    Jesse Warrick made it to the El Paso hotel that would be the team’s temporary base just after ten p.m. and stepped into a wall of noise and activity when he opened the door. Seemed he was the last to arrive. Most of the team had still been in D.C. after celebrating the New Year, but he’d left for Wyoming right after the party, hoping to catch a few days of downtime with his son before another mission called him away again. He’d gotten only one day with Connor—one long day of trying to coax the kid out of his teenage shell of indifference—before the call had come in from Harvard about Mara’s kidnapping.
    Christ, he was tired.
    Between the nauseating worry for Mara’s safety eating away at his gut, his heartache at his son’s complete apathy toward him, and the emotionally draining fight with his ex-wife when he’d told her he had to send Connor home early, he was running on fumes. Not to mention the calls to Mara’s parents—who, he’d found out, had fucking disowned her, and that was a whole ’nother can of worms he didn’t have the energy to open yet—and his own horrified family, the last twelve hours had been the longest of his life. He felt like a big steaming pile of manure, and the